US LETTER: "Gentle giant" or highly-strung thug? Thomas Junta (44) is a big man, broad-shouldered, thick-necked, barrel-chested in an ill-fitting suit.Patrick Smyth reports on a court case that is causing a great deal of soul searching over the relation between sport and violence on and off the pitch..
Most of the week he just sat there in the court his face betraying little emotion.
And then on Thursday the 19-stone truck driver got his moment to persuade the jury. He acquitted himself well in a calm, articulate performance that betrayed occasionally the torment he clearly feels. Despite provocation he did not snap, did not lose his cool. TV pundits were impressed.
But would the jury acquit? On July 5th at the Burbank Ice Arena in Massachusetts, attending an ice hockey game his kids were playing in, Junta beat to death the parent of one of their opponents after a row about violence on the rink. The fight took place in the presence of both men's children.
His trial on manslaughter charges this week has produced a great deal of soul-searching here, both about violence in the game and on its periphery among highly-driven parent spectators and about the sort of pressures they are putting on children.
It started as a "friendly". Two teams of small boys, one team aged between 10 and 11, the other a year or so older.
Quinlan Junta (10) was on the younger team which was running rings round the older boys, three of whom were children of match referee, Michael Costin.
As the younger boys got the upper hand, the mood grew uglier and they found themselves increasingly on the receiving end of heavy body checks and blows from their opponents' sticks.
Junta yelled at Costin, convinced he was encouraging the fouling, to control the checking and hitting. Costin yelled back, "That's hockey!" Later, as Junta's son skated off the ice, one of the other team elbowed him in the side of the face, Junta's lawyer told the court. Junta whisked his son and the boy's friends to the locker room, yelling at them to hurry. "I want to get out of here," the lawyer quoted Junta as saying.
Two confrontations then took place, the first in which it is alleged Costin attempted to kick Junta with the skates he was wearing.
Quinlan would testify in his father's defence. "He was kicking at my dad and trying to get at his neck. He tried to like, he pulled off his chain," the boy said. He said his father pushed Costin back but did not throw a punch.
The half-hour of the boy's testimony revealed a frightened child who was stunned by the turn of events at an otherwise routine hockey practice.
"I've never seen anything like that before," he said when asked under cross-examination to explain why he was crying after the fights.
When the two men were separated, Junta left the rink. But he returned a couple of minutes later when the sequence of events is deeply disputed.
Whoever initiated the fight, Costin ended up on the ground punching and kicking at Junta kneeling above him. According to the latter, again backed up in the witness box by his son, he administered three sharp punches to Costin, knocking him out.
Others testify to a beating that ran to between 10 and 20 punches.
"Did you hear Nancy Blanchard \the rink manager yelling at you to 'stop it, stop it, you're going to kill him'?" the prosecutor asked him. Did he hear another woman also appealing to him to stop? "No," he claimed,"there was no one in the area." In fact there were several people, including the sons of both men and other children.
Junta pleads self-defence. "He was coming at me like crazy," he said of Costin before he wrestled him to the ground. At times in tears, Junta told the court he left the ice rink without knowing how gravely he had injured Costin.
"I saw my dad and then I saw Mr Costin on his back," the young Junta said. "I saw him flip him over his shoulders. He went on the floor."
"I thought when he laid back down that he was just resting," the truck driver said, his voice choking.
Costin never regained consciousness. He died the next day.
Prosecutor Sheila Calkins grilled him about why he didn't try to walk away or pause between the three punches he said he landed.
"This is a 156-pound man lying on his back holding your wrist and you want this jury to believe you couldn't get away from him?" she said.
"Yes, I do because that's the truth," Junta said.
Medical evidence tends not to support him, however, with the examiner telling the court he had identified some 15 areas of trauma on the dead man's head and neck.
At the time of going to press the jury was still out.
psmyth@irish-times.ie